Dilemmas in Upgrade and Use of Railways Heritage: Approaches and Reflections on Structural Interventions

The protection of heritage values manifested by historical structures under pressure of ever-expanding ideas of modernisation, driven by development requirements and new technical needs, presents a continuous contemporary challenge. Railways as heritage present a very specific challenge. Often referred to as socio-technical systems, their economic and safe use is essential to safeguarding their continued existence and by extension their heritage value. Railway infrastructure also often passes through cities and landscapes with heritage value. New social needs and technical changes encourage authorities to introduce new techniques or even to implement complex reconstructions in historical railway structures such as viaducts, bridges and tunnels or even their surrounding urban elements. A lack of (inter)national protection can lead to an irreversible loss of heritage values when authorities and stakeholders do not see benefits in the protection of historical and cultural attributes. In this chapter, two cases will be presented: the challenges posed by the infrastructural upgrades required for the operation of the historic Rhaetian Railway in the Albula/Bernina Landscapes World Heritage property in Switzerland/Italy and the demolition for reconstruction of the historic nineteenth century Grzegórzecki Viaduct in Kraków, Poland. It will present the special dilemmas posed by the maintenance of railways heritage as operational systems and reflect on the personal experiences of the authors with these cases, concluding that, while in a technical sense, much might be possible, standardized solutions are not appropriate to valuable in-use heritage rail infrastructure.